Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced this week that the social media giant would undertake a global purge of accounts that have been locked due to suspicious activity.

Curiously, within hours of the clearout beginning, the US president had already lost 300,000 followers.

Twitter’s move is part of a wider plan to eradicate trolls, bullies, hate speech and political manipulation from the platform. Back in March, the company went through a mea culpa in which they acknowledged that the misuse of their service has had “real-world negative consequences”.

We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.

Why? We love instant, public, global messaging and conversation. It’s what Twitter is and it’s why we‘re here. But we didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences. We acknowledge that now, and are determined to find holistic and fair solutions.

To amend the situation, Twitter launched a public request for proposals to come up with “Twitter Health Metrics” that could improve their ability to regulate the platform and spot and prevent harmful behaviour more effectively.

On Wednesday, in a continuation of their plan to improve the “conversational health” of the service, Dorsey announced they would be dropping all accounts locked because of unusual behaviour.

This week we’ll be removing locked Twitter accounts (locked when we detect suspicious changes in behavior) from follower counts across profiles globally. The number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down. #healthhttps://t.co/JGmE4ofoZ2

About the author

Filmmaker. 3D artist. Procrastination guru. I spend most of my time doing VFX work for my upcoming film Servicios Públicos, a sci-fi dystopia about robots, overpopulated cities and tyrant states. @iampineros